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The Five Greatest Warriors (novel)
The Five Greatest Warriors is the Matthew Reilly's third novel featuring Jack West Jr as the main protanganist. It is also the sequel to The Six Sacred Stones. Plot Summary The story picks up where The Six Sacred Stones left off - with Jack's fall from the Vertex under Table Mountain with the suicidal Marine Switchblade. As they fall, Jack pulls Swtichblade's Maghook from the Marine's holster, and fires it into the wall of the abyss, leaving Switchblade to continue falling. He climbs out of the abyss and is reunited with Alby, and he reaches Wickham's submarine, which was waiting in the tunnel for a gap in the patrolling American and South African naval vessels to escape. Whilst the Halicarnassus flees South African fighters, it receives a call from Jack, instructing them to make for Heard Island. Meanwhile, Wolf concludes his bargain with Vulture. He takes the charged Second Pillar and its reward, Heat, and gives the First Pillar and its knowledge to Vulture. Then he discusses the wherabouts of the other Pillars and Vertices with Mao and Iolanthe. Iolanthe says she still has the Fourth Pillar, and the Third was in possession of the Japanese Royal Family. At the end of World War Two, Hirohito hid the Third Pillar somewhere in Japan. Also, Wolf gives Mao leave to destroy Jack's coalition of small nations. At Heard Island, Jack and Alby are reunited with Wizard, Zoe, Lily and Sky Monster, and meet Ono and Dr Diane Cassidy. Jack shows Wizard the Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis, and explains to them that Wolf sent Stretch back to the Mossad and claimed the bounty on his head. Jack also decides that Alby will return home to Perth, and Lily will go with him so she will be safe. The others will go after the other Pillars and Vertices. First, however, they find Pooh Bear and help him rescue Stretch from the Mossad base at a secret nuclear weapons factory in Israel. There, Stretch was being kept in a tank of formaldehyde - preserved as a living trophy for the rest of his life by Mordechai Muniz, the influential former head of the Mossad. Stretch was to be the latest addition in Muniz's private collection, which was a practice pioneered by a former KGB operative. The team returns to Zanzibar, apart from Lily who is still with Alby, and use the period between the placing of the Pillars to do research. The dates for the placement of the last four Pillars are revealed by Wizard: the Third on 11 March; the Fourth and Fifth must be placed simultaneously, on March 18; and the final Pillar on March 20. All must be placed during a Titanic Rising, apart from the Sixth, which must be placed at the moment of the Dual Equinox, when both the Sun and the Dark Sun are aligned with the Earth. At this point, Diane Cassidy steps in. She explains why she was searching for the Neetha - she knows about the Pillars, the Vertices and the Dark Sun. Her expertise in the lost tribe all stemmed from her search for information about the Machine. Since the Neetha were connected to the Machine, she found out all she could about them. She explains that her reference point for her search was the Rhyme of the Warriors, a carving found on a tablet unearthed by Napolean at the Sphinx. It tells of five key individuals throughout history who have had a significant connection with the Machine. Cassidy explains her reasoning - since the Great Pyramid was built by the Pharaoh Khufu, and it, the Capstone and the Firestone have all been integral to Jack's mission, it is reasonable to assume that Khufu had a high level of knowledge about the Machine. She continues by explaining that she has found references to all Six Pillars being kept together in Egypt, at the time when Khufu was Pharaoh. Collectively, the Six Pillars are referred to as 'Khufu's Wisdom', or 'Khufu's Treasure'. The answer to what became of Khufu's treasure lies in the Rhyme of the Warriors. Cassidy has worked out who the five warriors are, using the Rhyme, a carving from Karakorum in Mongolia and a text by the Chinese Philosopher Laozi. She believes the warriors are: Moses, Jesus, Genghis Kahn and Napolean Bonaparte. The Fifth Warrior, however, is unknown, but appears to live in the present, since he will be there 'at the end of all things'. They continue their research, discovering many things about the Royal Houses of Europe, Isaac Newton, and Wizard theorises on the nature of the remaining rewards - 'Sight' (possibly the ability to see the future, maybe one's own death), Life (possibly immortality - the property that so obssessed Issac Newton);Death (possibly the ability to deal death to one's enemies), and Power - absolute Earthly power to the one who completes the Machine. Then Lily makes a breakthorugh with some carvings in the Word of Thoth. Before Pillars are placed in the Machine, they need to be 'Cleansed' by the Philosopher's Stone. However, the carving implies that the last four need a special kind of 'Double Cleansing', since the Dark Sun will be much closer in March and will thus be emitting more power. A carving from Saqqara reveals the nature of this second cleansing - in addition to being cleansed by the Philosopher's Stone, the last four Pillars must be cleansed in the Basin of Rameses II, the last of the Six Sacred Stones. Then they discover the connections between the Warriors and the Pillars. At one point, all Six Pillars resided in Egypt under Khufu, where they remained until the reign of Akhenaten, the Pharaoh who preached monotheism. After Akhenaten's assassination, one of his priests, who would later be called Moses, stole the Pillars and the Twin Tablets, and fled from Egypt. He gave the Pillars to his brother Aaron, who passed them down his family until they came to Jesus. Jesus kept one of the Pillars, but gave the others away. Two of the Pillars were given to the families who would eventually become the Great Houses of Europe - the Fourth Pillar was owned by the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and the Fifth is in joint ownership of the House of Oldenberg and the House of Romanov. Jesus gave the remaining three Pillars to his brother James, who hid one in the Temple of Solomon, until the Pillar was taken to Africa by the Templars, and somehow ended up with the Neetha. James kept the other two Pillars at the fortress in Van, where they remained for years until it was raided by Genghis Khan. Khan would later give one of the Pillars to a Bedouin tribe as a gift of thanks for aiding him, a tribe which eventually became the Royal House of Saud. After visiting the Shogun of Japan, Khan gave him the remaining Pillar, which would eventually be hidden by Hirohito. One of Khan's grandsons tried to retrieve the Pillar, attacking a worthless bay twice. This leads Julius and Lachlan to deduce that the Third Vertex (from the Stonehenge images) was hidden on Japan's North Island of Hokkaido. Nine years later, the Shogun sent a message to Khan, informing him of the maze they had built within the Temple-Shrine (the Vertex) to protect the Pillar, and to send him a gift of a petrified Dinosaur Egg carved with images of the Vertex's entrance, and five other landscapes. However, the images on the Egg could have been copies by others - notably Carl Faberge on his Faberge eggs. Cassidy explains that the Neetha warlock who is helping Wolf also knew about the Egg. According to the Twins' research, the Egg was hidden in Genghis Khan's Arsenal, a hidden location somewhere in Mongolia. Jack sets out for Mongolia immediately, but intercepted messages show that both Wolf and the Japanese Blood Brotherhood are heading there as well. They discover the Arsenal hidden in a meteor crater, over which a fake mound has been constructed. However, Wolf and the Japanese have already arrived. Wolf verifies that the Egg does indeed contain images of the entrances to all the Vertices, but then the Japanese, led by Tank Tanaka, arrive and destroy it. However, Wolf managed to get photographs, and leaves with Rapier, allowing Mao to destroy the citadel and all those inside it - Jack, Zoe, Lily, Sky Monster and the Japanese. Wolf has already killed Wizard. Jack and the others escape through a secret escape tunnel, but first they find Khan's shield - onto which he transcribed the images from the Egg. Jack takes the unconscious Tank with them, to use his knowledge in place of Wizard's. Meanwhile, the Dark Sun's approach is causing havoc in the world, causing extreme weather across the globe, whilst its presence in the outer solar system is causing massive storms on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. China reveals two new aircraft carriers, and makes aid payments to a large number of countries - the largest of which goes to Chile. A small tsunami strikes the northern tip of Hokkaido Island in Japan. And a man watches from the shadows. His name is unknown, but he is a friend of General Muniz, and is in competition with him to build up a collection of Living Trophies in formaldehyde tanks. Alby, meanwhile, has worked out the times of the Titanic Risings that occur on 11 and 18 March, and the time of the Dual Equinox on March 20. He also theorises that the increased number of tsunamis that have been occurring recently is due to the Dark Sun's gravitational pull affecting, not just the tides, but the Earth's crust itself, and the resultant buckling of the crust is causing the tsunamis, which could make entering the last four Vertices dangerous. Then Scimitar and Vulture arrive and abduct him and his mother, taking them out of Australia unnoticed by all, apart from a spy satellite thought to have been decomissioned. Then their plane is attacked by Russian fighters, and they are forced to land. Shortly before he was abducted, Alby discovered Napolean's connection with the Machine. During his search for Bekhen monuments, Napolean discovered a stone basin - the Basin of Rameses - which was stolen from him by the British. The Basin now sits in the British Museum, although it is under a different name. Whilst Jack, Zoe, Lily and Sky Monster head to Japan and the Third Vertex, the twins, Pooh and Stretch go to Britain and successfully steal the Basin during a bomb scare. Whilst Jack travels to Hokkaido Island, he interrogates the captured Tank Tanaka, who reveals that the entire nation of Japan supports his efforts, and the Third Vertex is guarded by the Japanease navy. As they arrive in Japan, Wolf has launched a frontal assualt on the bay above the entrance to the Vertex. As a tsunami is about to hit the island, the ocean has retreated into the bay as it does before a tsunami, provinding dry entry to the Vertex. The Japanese fight hard, and manage to pin Rapier and Astro behind a wrecked ship, preventing him from reaching the Vertex - Rapier is carrying the Philosopher's Stone, which they need to cleanse the Pillar hidden inside the Vertex. Then Jack, Zoe and Lily arrive in a smaller aircraft, launched from the Halicarnassus, ''and rescue Rapier. Everyone makes it into the Vertex before the wave hits. At the top of the stair-mountain, they behold the Third Vertex - a gigantic cavern with a lava floor. At the centre of the cavern is a volcanic cone, and beyond the cone is the Vertex itself. Wolf, Rapier and his CIEF team, who are accompanied by the Neetha Warlock, turn their guns on Jack and Zoe, but since Lily knows the safe route through the maze between the stairs and the cone, they agree a truce to place the Pillar together. However, as they move through the maze they are attcked by Japanese forces hiding in the cavern. Surviving the attacks, they reach the volcanic cone, which contains a second maze. At the centre of this maze is a shrine containing the Third Pillar. However, they may only enter this maze at sunset and sunrise. Whilst they wait, Rapier expresses his resentment of Jack - as long as Jack is around, their father only views Rapier as second-best. Rapier promises to kill Jack. Later, Jack and Astro make up, since Wolf lied to Astro about Jack planning to destroy America. Astro then reveals that, after the Pillar has been placed, he and the CIEF team have orders to kill Jack and Zoe. They successfully place the pillar. A lone Japanese sniper very nearly kills them, and in the firefight, Jack and his father receive a vision of Jack's death from the pillar: what appears to be a firey accident involving a falling aircraft. Wolf decides to let Jack go free after Jack saves his life. Unfortunately, all involved are captured by a group of Russians. At the same time, Jack's friends are picked up from their various assignments around the world. Everyone is taken to a dam in far eastern Siberia, where they meet the Carnivore, General Muniz's friend and the creator of the "living tombs". The Carnivore is the last of the House of Romanov, and the leader of the coalition of royal houses in Europe. Diane Cassidy is also revealed to be one of his conspiratos. After forcing Jack to fight his half-brother to the death, the Carnivore subjects Jack's friends to his hellish prison cells to encourage him to place the fourth and fifth pillars. Without a choice, Jack agrees. The Carnivore makes a similar arrangement with Mao Gongli, Scimitar and Vulture, holding their loved ones hostage and sending them out to find the sixth and final pillar. The fourth and fifth pillars must be placed simultaneously. Jack, Lily and Iolanthe make for Diego Garcia while Pooh Bear, Stretch and the Adamson twins go to Lundy Island. Shortly after they place their pillars, the Carnivore and Cassidy abandon their Siberian base and their victims, leaving them to die. Wolf escapes and gives pursuit, heading for Easter Island. Meanwhile, Jack, Lily and Iolanthe return to Israel, where they locate the Tomb of Jesus Christ, the bearer of the sixth and final pillar. After Pooh Bear is forced to kill Scimitar and Vulture, Jack himself makes for Easter Island aboard a heavily damaged ''Halicarnassus. Meanwhile, the Dark Sun enters the edge of the solar system and planet earth is subjected to extreme weather conditions. Unable to land his plane, Jack crash-lands in the entrance to the Easter Island shrine. Unable to catch either Wolf or the Carnivore in the ten minutes remaining until the final pillar must be placed, Jack uses the remains of the Halicarnassus to cover the ground between himself and the Carnivore. Jack kills the former KGB operative with the plane's sole remaining gun, which literally blasts him to nothingness. Lily, the only person Jack trusts - not least of all because she is the only one who can read the Worth of Thoth - carries out the final placement. The reward for the sixth pillar is power, the ability to make one's thoughts a reality. Imbued with the power of the pillar, Lily goes on a murderous rampage, killing Cassidy and Mao Gongli in a grotesque fashion before Jack is able to stop her. As the Great Machine activates and the world is saved from the Dark Sun, Jack casts the pillar into the void beneath the Vertex. Wolf gives chase, but the Halicarnassus causes the balcony overlooking the void to collapse, and he falls to his death as he chases the pillar. We learn that because it was Wolf's blood and not Jack's on the third pillar in Hokkaido, it was a vision of Wolf's death that Jack saw. Jack and Lily leave Easter Island, returning to Siberia in time to free their friends and the Carnivore's victims from the fomaldehyde tanks. The epilogue sees Jack and Zoe married and living in Australia with Lily. The five surviving pillars remain hidden, with Jack reporting that they had been lost or destroyed over the course of their mission. Zoe discerns that the fifth Greatest Warrior - whose identity had gone unknown because of his role to play in the potential apocalypse - was actually Jack, and the story ends. Last Sections From Wikipedia. The Five Warriors Each of the Five Warriors has a special connection with the Machine, or the Golden Capstone. Moses The First shall be noble, scholar and soldier both. During the Six Sacred Stones, Jack West and Pooh Bear recover The Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis, also known as the Ten Commandments. These tablets are actually identical copies of the same five lines in the Word of Thoth - an incantation which must be performed at the final Vertex to activate the Machine. Jack explains that historians believe that Moses was actually an Egyptian preist of Pharaoh Akhenaten's regime, called Thuthmosis (meaning 'Son of Thoth, since Moses is an Egyptian name, meaning 'son of'). Akhenaten preached monotheism, the belief in only one God, as opposed to the traditional many Egyptian Gods. After Akhenaten was assassinated, Thuthmosis fled Egypt with the Tablets. Jesus The Second be a natural leader of men. None shall achieve greater fame than he. During The Six Sacred Stones, there is a discussion of what makes one person worthy to rule over another. Often it was the family who possessed some form of talisman who ruled, and certain Houses and people have always been more famed than others. Two of the Great Houses of Europe and the House of Saud each possess Pillars, elevating them above other families, but what made Jesus especially famous was that he did not possess just one Pillar - he had three. By the time of The Five Greatest Warriors, the sixth and final pillar has been buried with him. Genghis Khan The Third shall be the Greatest Warlord known to history. During his conquest, Genghis Khan discovered the precise locations of many of the Vertices. These locations were hidden in his Tomb. Napolean Bonaparte The Fourth shall be the great obsessor, seeking only glory, but glory is a lie. Napolean has already been linked with the Capstone in Seven Ancient Wonders, taking a whole army to Egypt to search for it. During this time, he entered the King's chamber of the Great Pyramid alone, and emerged hours later cowed and afraid of what he had seen. Jack West Jr The Fifth shall face the greatest test, and decide if all shall live, or die. Jack West's importance is not revealed until his battle with Wolf beneath the final Vertex, forshadowed in the rhyme at the start of The Six Sacred Stones: 'A mortal battle between father and son, one fights for all, and the other for one'. The Vertices The six vertices are massive underground Temple-Shrines, each connecting to a corner of the Machine. Each Vertex is individual, a unique testament to the Machine. The centrepiece of each Vertex is an inverted pyramid made of a bronze-like metal which has magnetic properties, suspended above a deep abyss. The Pillars must be placed in the Vertices during a Titanic Rising, a celestial event which occurs when Saturn's moon, Titan, rises and falls behind Saturn. At the time of the Return, Saturn was in line with Jupiter when the Rising occurred. Since the Dark Sun was approaching from behind Jupiter, the effects of light bending in a planet's gravity field allowed some of the Dark Sun's Black Light to shine upon the Earth, but not at the high levels required to sterilise the planet. The Black Light served as a trigger to prime each Vertex to receive ite Pillar. The locations of the Vertices were revealed at Stonehenge, using the altar stone and the Sa-Benben. More specifically, the entrances to the Temple-Shrines were engraved on the walls of Genghis Khan's tomb. The First Vertex - The Great Viewing Hall The First Vertex is located beneath Lake Nasser in Southern Egypt. Jack West located the entrance to the Temple-Shrine using the eyelines of two of the statues at Abu Simbel. The Vertex is a vast hall built off the main abyss, allowing people to gaze out from where the hall meets the abyss, onto the inverted pyramid. The pyramid is reached by a bridge which rises from the abyss when a lock is triggered using the First Pillar. The Pillar was being kept by the House of Saud, and its reward is 'Knowledge', which appears as formulae and text on the sides of the Pillar, in the Word of Thoth. The secrets given by the pillar, one on each of the four sides, include instructions for an ultrastrong yet ultralight form of carbon-fibre; a diagram of the star Sirius and its two companion stars, Sirius B and Sirius C, which is a zero-point field; and an explanation of the Universal Expansion Problem. The fourth piece of knowledge was never revealed during the novel. The First Pillar was placed during The Six Sacred Stones, on 10 December 2007. The Second Vertex - The City of Bridges The Second Vertex lies beneath Table Mountain, at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. It was located by Lachlan and Julius Adamson before they were captured by the Japanese Blood Brotherhood. Also, the Warlock of the Neetha claimed to have seen the Second Vertex, and he took Wolf's American force to it. The Vertex is a replica of the Mesopotamian city of Ur, or rather Ur is a replica of the much older Vertex, featuring two entrances. The 'City' is a network of towers, each connected by bridges which use Aristotle's Riddles to determine the correct path through them. To reach the inverted pyramid, suspended above another abyss off the main cavern, one would have had to get to the ziggurat at the centre of the city, through the traps in the towers, then climb a thin ladder to the roof, and swing along handrungs which ran to the pyramid and down its side to the apex. It was at the Second Vertex that Switchblade attempted to destroy the Second Pillar, by dropping it into the abyss, only to be stopped by Jack West. The Pillar was kept by the Neetha tribe, and its reward was 'Heat', which Wolf's chief researcher, Felix Bonaventura, believed was the secret of perpetual motion, or limitless energy. The Second Pillar was placed during The Six Sacred Stones, on 17 December 2007. The Third Vertex - The Fire Maze The Third Vertex is located beneath Hokkaido Island in Japan. Surrounding the Vertex is a maze suspended over a lake of molten magma. The Third Pillar was hidden within a trap system, which was in turn within the Third Vertex. The Pillar's reward is 'Sight' - this was a vision of Jack's Death, which was later revealed to actually be Wolf's death. The Thrid Pillar was placed during The Five Greatest Warriors, on 11 March 2008. The Fourth Vertex - The City of Waterfalls The Fourth Vertex is located beneath Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, England. The Fourth Pillar was possessed by the British Royal Family, and was retrieved from the Bortherhood by the Carnivore. He then gave it to Pooh Bear, Stretch and the Adamson twins to be placed at the Fourth Vertex. Its reward is 'Life', which is not revealed in the book. This could be the ability to bring people back from the dead. The Fourth and Fifh Pillars must be placed simultaneously, on 18 March 2008, during The Five Greatest Warriors. The Fifth Vertex - The Realm of the Sealords The Fifth Vertex is located beneath the island of Diego Garcia, in the Maldives. The Fifth Pillar was in joint possession of the Royal Houses of Romanov and Oldenberg, and was protected by the Carnivore. He gave it to Jack West, Lily and Iolanthe to place at the Vertex. Its reward is 'Death'. Some believe the Reward to be a weapon, dealing death to the enemies of the one who holds it. The Fourth and Fifth Pillars must be placed simultaneously, on 18 March 2008, during The Five Greatest Warriors. The Sixth Vertex - The Greatest Shrine of All The final Vertex is located beneath Ahu Vai Mata, the North-Western corner of Easter Island. The Sixth and final Pillar must be placed on 20 March 2008, not during a Titanic Rising, as the others were, but during the Dual Equinox, when both the Sun and the Dark Sun are shining on the Vertex. Once the Pillar is placed, the incantation etched into the Twin Tablets of Thuthmosis must be spoken aloud to activate the Machine. The Pillar was hidden within the tomb of Jesus Christ in Israel. The reward for placing the final Pillar is 'Power', which grants whoever holds it whatever they wish - be it world domination, the death of an enemy or the destruction of cities on their whim. Possible Future Novels In the interview at the end of the book, the question "You've already written Seven Ancient Wonders, Six Sacred Stones and the Five Greatest Warriors. will the Jack West Jr series of books count down all the way to the One...?" was asked. After a short explanation, Reilly states that he will probably write "The Four Something Somethings" and could very well work down to "The One Something Something", so it is very likely that there are still novels in the series yet to come.